Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Why Testing Is So Important

When sending an email to your subscribers you are sending a representation of your company whether you like it or not. People will view the email they receive and judge your company from it. Of course if the recipient really likes the email they see, then they may even share it on Facebook, Twitter or forward it to a friend. With that in mind it is even more important to make sure your email looks as good as possible as you never know who might see it.

This brings us to testing, testing is the key stage that should not be missed as it gives you time to notice and correct any mistakes so you can be confident pressing that all important send button because once it is sent there is no going back! As many of you will know email clients will interpret the HTML code from your email differently not to mention those on different devices. To help you conquer the inbox we provide an inbox preview feature which will show you exactly what your email will look like in over 14 email clients and best of all it is FREE for paying accounts!

Once you have your email looking great in the mountain of email clients available the tough bit is over with.

Don't fall at the last hurdle

Although the main section within testing is complete, lots of people forget about the images they add into their emails and just expect them to be displayed. Unfortunately email clients will often have images turned off by default which means they will only be displayed once the recipient clicks a link to download them. This isn’t so bad if you have a good ratio of text to images as the recipients can still understand the overview of your email and get the full understanding of it once the images have been downloaded. However if you are sending image only emails it becomes more difficult for recipients to understand what your email is about because they won't see anything.

For example, I have shown a screenshot below of a simple image being used as an email but as you can see the recipient will have no idea what the email is about. The reason they won’t know is because they can’t see the image as they haven’t downloaded the images, but more importantly it is because there has been no Alt text added.

Alt text often gets forgotten about when you are in a rush to send your email, but if you don’t have any then you are missing an ideal opportunity to persuade the recipient to download the images to see what is hidden. You can easily style the ALT text being displayed in the images so it doesn’t have to be boring and it can often blend in with your email design.

As you can see from the screenshot below, Alt text has now been used to give the recipient an idea of what they can expect once they download the images. Immediately they know it is going to be an offer for 75% off selected styles. With that Alt text clearly presented it will hopefully get them to click on that “Display images below” link so they can see the full email as intended.

Once the link to download the images has been clicked they will be able to view the images within the email and understand the offer.

As you can see some parts of testing emails are quite small and can easily be forgotten about but they can also have a big impact on your email's success. So make sure you go through ALL steps of testing and not just the main ones because it is down to you to make your email as appealing as possible.